Hobson's Choice
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weddings
What makes us love weddings? We know why young girls love them. I can imagine why parents love them: this child has made it to adulthood and is socially acceptable enough to marry; we can sigh a big sigh of relief.
But what about us? We nearly-middle-aged married people far from being young girls or the mother of the bride?
One college lecture has stuck with me for 13 years now; the lecturer compared Chaucer and the Gawain poet to different types of music. While the poets themselves don't apply here, the music does. Yes, said the lecturer (whose name I no longer remember, only that he stored things under his sweater, which gave him the appearance of a square stomach), Bach is wonderful in all his complexity and counterpoint. But... but don't discount country music with its simple melody and the bass note rhythm that twangs to the heart of our cultural beliefs.
Much of marriage is like that country song, the simple song of a person breathing next to us through the night. The joys of marriage are mainly quotidian, the pleasures of tending to life and keeping it going. So much revolves around tending one another, in houses and apartments and gardens, tending children and minor ailments, practicing the music of well-honed sex.
In the midst of bill paying and cooking and dog training, it's good to go to a wedding and hear the thrum of passion, the bass note that beats below it all. It's good to be reminded of the grand old story, the deep notes, that we're part of. It�s exciting to remember what brought us to the not-to-be-discounted quotidian joys, the rightness of where we are, the thrill that still sounds its note. It's good to dance.
7:42 a.m. - 2005-10-04
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